By: Blair Abington

On Feb. 13, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia  died of reportedly natural causes. Though he died a peaceful death, he left the country in a confusing predicament.

A background on Scalia: he was born March, 11, 1936, and practiced law in the 1960s. President Ronald Reagan first placed Scalia on the Court of Appeals, later nominating him as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served until his death.

Now that he has passed, should President Barack Obama be able to appoint a new judge? Questions are raised – why wouldn’t he be able to select a new judge?

Well, for starters, Scalia was a lion of conservative legal thought. The reason this impacts the current debate is because of the polar ideologies working at hand: a democratic president with the ability to tip the ideological sway of the court into a more liberal direction. Currently the court has four judges who generally lean more towards the liberal side and five judges who usually vote more conservatively.

From a liberal point of view, most would feel content if President Obama was able to select the new judge because then the Supreme Court would likely have more liberal points of views as well as decisions. From a Republican point of view, many feel President Obama should not appoint a new judge and would be bitter if he did. And now, both parties are frantically trying to find proof of why Obama should / shouldn’t appoint a new judge.

Coming from someone who is close to obsessed with politics, this situation left me speechless as well. I myself had done extensive research and piled over historical precedents to find something that could prove either party correct.

On May 14, 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned and his seat was left open for 391 days because the first two people nominated by President Richard Nixon were rejected. Republicans are using this to point out we can leave the position open until the next president takes office. Contradicting that,in 1988 Judge Anthony M. Kennedy was nominated by President Ronald Reagan (and approved by the Senate) with a little less than a year left in the presidential term.

After finding information to support both sides, I am still unsure which side to support. Why can’t our country just compromise? Let President Obama appoint a new judge to make the Democrats happy, but make sure he is conservative to make the Republicans happy.

Leaving this important position open for six months is a defective decision, but fighting like fools over it is also fatuous. George Washington had a good point when he warned about the formation of political parties in his inaugural address: “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

When this decision will come to a conclusion is still undecided, but then again, so am I.